Amazon SDE II interview Experience
- Posted
- 22 Oct 2026
Summary
I interviewed for an SDE II role at Amazon, went through four rounds covering system design, behavioral, and DSA questions, but ultimately was not offered the position.
How it went
Amazon SDE II Interview Experience
Round 1: System Design + Behavioral
- Design an Examination System.
- Explain SOLID principles.
- LP: Taking Ownership.
- How do you use Generative AI in your engineering workflow?
Round 2: DSA + Behavioral
- Find the first unique element in a data stream.
- LP: Dive Deep
- LP: Invent and Simplify
Round 3: Bar Raiser — DSA + Behavioral
- Find an element in a row-wise and column-wise sorted matrix.
- LP: Deliver Results — Describe a time you drove a task to completion and created impact.
- LP: Learn and Be Curious
Round 4: Hiring Manager + High-Level Design
- Design a system that predicts a customer's issue using their previous Amazon orders and connects them with the appropriate support agent.
- How would you scale the chat service to handle sudden traffic spikes?
- Why would you choose EC2 for hosting the service?
- Why would you choose SQL over NoSQL?
- How would you handle auto-scaling, database consistency, and ACID transactions?
- LP: Earn Trust
- LP: Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit — Describe a time you disagreed with your manager's proposed solution.
All the Best!! This might help someone. I couldn't clear it, hopefully you will do.
#Amazon #SDE2 #SDEII #FAANG #MAANG
Questions asked (10)
- 01
Design an Examination System
System Design
Design an examination system that can handle test creation, candidate registration, exam delivery, scoring, and result reporting.
- 02
Explain SOLID Principles
Other
Provide an explanation of the SOLID principles of object‑oriented design and give examples of how each principle can be applied.
- 03
Generative AI in Engineering Workflow
Other
Describe how you would incorporate generative AI tools (e.g., code‑completion, test generation) into your day‑to‑day engineering workflow.
- 04
First Unique Element in Data Stream
Data Structures & Algorithms
Given a stream of integers, find the first element that appears exactly once in the stream at any point in time. Optimize for O(1) lookup and minimal memory usage.
- 05
Search in Row‑wise and Column‑wise Sorted Matrix
Data Structures & Algorithms
Given an M x N matrix where each row and each column is sorted in ascending order, write an algorithm to determine whether a target integer exists in the matrix.
- 06
Predict Customer Issue and Route to Support Agent
System Design
Design a system that predicts a customer's issue based on their previous Amazon orders and routes the request to the most appropriate support agent. Include data ingestion, feature engineering, prediction model, and routing logic.
- 07
Scale Chat Service for Traffic Spikes
System Design
Explain how you would scale a real‑time chat service to handle sudden spikes in traffic, covering load balancing, message persistence, latency reduction, and fault tolerance.
- 08
Choose EC2 for Hosting Service
Other
Discuss reasons for selecting Amazon EC2 over other compute options when hosting a scalable backend service.
- 09
Choose SQL over NoSQL
Other
Explain scenarios where a relational database (SQL) is preferred over a NoSQL solution for a given application.
- 10
Auto‑scaling, Consistency, and ACID Transactions
System Design
Describe how you would handle auto‑scaling of services, ensure database consistency, and maintain ACID transaction guarantees in a distributed system.